While it may be March, it’s still very much wintertime. If you’ve been cursing the snow and ice and desperately longing for spring, you’re not alone. But let’s look at the bright side - all that frozen water offers certain opportunities that just aren’t available in the spring. And I’m not talking about expensive and time consuming snow-sports, I’m talking about wildlife tracking. To give you an introduction to tracking, We headed for the woods of Barrington, New Hampshire with Dan Gardoqui, one of the founders and directors of White Pine Programs, a nature connection non-profit in Southern Maine.

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The Word of Mouth Saturday broadcast is your shining beacon of awesome at the end of a snowy week. Whether you're wearing headphones under your winter hat or you're listening in a snow-covered car, we have the segments that delight and enlighten. You may even forget we have six more weeks of winter! Listen to the full show, and scroll down for links and more.

Wildlife tracks in the snow indicate of a lot of coming and going in the nighttime world. Why are so many animals active, given their limited ability to see in the dark?

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Originally broadcast 2/7/14.

There's the obvious reason: division of resources helps avoid competition. A red-tailed hawk hunts the same fields by day that a great horned owl hunts by night. Night also offers some animals protection from their main predators. Mice lie low by day, but in the wild—and in my house—they come out at night.

In his book, New Hampshire’s Ben Kilham describes what he has learned in his twenty years studying these creatures. Contrary to their image as solitary and not-that-intelligent, Kilham finds bears capable of altruism, and cooperation. He even finds them possess a complex communication system, as well as social behaviors that at times look a lot like ours.